Havre High grad in final election for Denver mayor

Editor’s note: This version corrects who Kelly Brough faces in the runoff election for mayor of Denver.

A Havre High School graduate is facing off Tuesday in the runoff election to be mayor of the 19th-largest city of the nation.

Kelly (Broere) Brough is facing Micheal Johnston Tuesday in nonpartisan runoff election for mayor of Denver.

The two received the most votes in a crowded election April 4, with 22 candidates, but neither received a majority of the votes, leading to Tuesday's runoff election.

Brough did not respond to requests for an interview from Havre Daily News.

According to a Denver Post article that ran in 2009 after she was hired as president and CEO of Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Brough was born in Shelby.

She moved with her family as a infant to Washington, D.C., shortly after her father landed a job with Boeing. But before she was 1, her father was stabbed and killed.

Her mother remarried a pipeline worker and moved to Havre.

The post reported that, when Brough was a junior in high school, her stepfather - the family's breadwinner - sustained an injury that forced him to leave his job. Her mother took a job with the U.S. Postal Service.

The article said she helped pay her way through college, saving $10,000 working at Dairy Queen to help pay for college at Montana State University in Bozeman, where she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1986.

Brough earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of Colorado at Denver in 1989.

Brough married Mike Brough in Havre in 1985, his obituary says, and they divorced and he moved back to Montana before he died in 2014.

Kelly Brough worked for former then-Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper from 2003 to 2009, finishing as his chief of staff, Ballotpedia reports. Brough later worked as president and C.E.O. of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce from 2009 to 2021, and chief strategy officer at Metropolitan State University of Denver from 2021 to 2022.

Johnston, her opponent in the Denver election, was a member of the Colorado State Senate from 2009 to 2017, Ballotpedia reports, and was a candidate in the Democratic primary for Colorado governor in 2018, losing to Jared Polis, who won the general election and was re-elected last year.

A poll conducted in April following the first election showed Brough and Johnston statistically tied, although it showed Johnston with a lead.

The April 18 poll by Chism Strategies showed Johnston in the lead with 39 percent to Brough's 34 percent with a nearly 5 percent statistical error and 27 percent of voters at that time saying they were undecided.